English 356: Modernism

fall 2010

Wes Chapman English House 205 556-3090 wchapman@iwu.edu

Office Hours: MW 3-4 TTh 10-11 and by appt

Course Description

"In or about December 1910," Virginia Woolf wrote, "human character changed." This belief that a sweeping transformation was taking place in the world was characteristic of modernism, often accompanied by attempts to reinvent art in order to represent better the upheavals and complexities of modernity. In this course, we will study a number of texts from the modernist era (roughly, the period from the beginning of WWI until the beginning of WWII) in order to understand this sense of transformation. We will limit our survey of modernism to British and American literary texts (although modernism was an international movement in all of the arts).

The course goals are as follows:

• to develop your understanding of British and American literary modernism: what it is, who some of its main practitioners were, how and why it came about, and how it related to modernism in some of the other arts;
• to develop your ability to read, interpret, discuss and write about individual texts of the era, including some of the difficult experimental texts for which modernism is best known;
• to develop your ability to research a topic of your own devising pertinent to the literature of the era; and
• to encourage you to accept (albeit temporarily) the challenges of modernist writing, i.e. to question how we know the world or indeed whether the world can be known, to consider how new representations of the world might better reflect its complexities, contradictions and dark undercurrents, to question the nature of identity and the self, to examine the role of gender and sexuality in our representations of the world, and to consider what values can and should survive the destructiveness, tawdriness, fragmentation and injustice of modern civilization.

Required Texts

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Ramazani et al, eds., The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, vol. 1
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
miscellaneous readings from the Internet (listed below)

Course Requirements

Your grade in this class will be based upon the following:

• a short paper (3-5 pages) - 15%
• a reading journal - 30%
• an annotated bibliography - 10%
• a long paper (10-15 pages) - 25%
• a final exam - 20%

Specific assignments for the papers will be posted on the web site as the term progresses.

All work will be graded on or converted to a 0-100 scale, where 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, and 0-59 = F. The highest three numbers in a range are equivalent to a plus grade (e.g. 87-89 = B+); the lowest three are equivalent to a minus (e.g. 90-92 = A-).

Attendance is mandatory. I will evaluate attendance on a case by case basis, but in general you should expect that more than four absences for any reason, including illness and university-sponsored activities, will lower your final grade.

Late papers: your grade on a paper will be penalized by 3 points (e.g. 92 to 89) for every calendar day that any part of it (e.g. topic, first draft, final draft) is late, up to a maximum of 20 points (e.g. 95 to 75). I rarely grant extensions on papers, but you're welcome to ask (I do sometimes negotiate reduced late penalties). Because a low grade--say, an F at 50 points--is much less destructive to a grade than a 0 is, it is nearly always worthwhile to make up late work.

Participation in discussion is important in this class. Although there will be no separate grade rubric for participation, active and thoughtful participation in class will raise a borderline grade, while passive or disruptive participation will lower one. (A borderline grade is defined as a grade within .5 of a point of the cutoff between two grades. For example, 90 is the cutoff between B+ and A-; 89.5 - 90.5 is the borderline range between the two grades.)

Plagiarism will affect your grade in one of two ways. If you turn in a paper which is plagiarized in minor or unintentional ways (e.g. you use the language of a source you are writing about without quotes, but in only a brief passage and clearly without any intention to represent someone else's work as your own), the paper will receive a 0, and we will discuss plagiarism until it is clear that you understand what it is and how to avoid it. You may be able to rewrite such a paper for a higher grade if there is enough time left in the term. However, if you turn in a paper which, in my judgment, plagiarizes blatantly, either at length or with apparent intent to deceive, you will receive an F in the course, regardless of any other grades you have received, and I will file an Academic Dishonesty Report with the Associate Provost.

Projected Course Schedule

T 8/24 - Introduction.
Th 8/26 - Order, imagination, and reality: pre-modernist rumblings. Readings: Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach" (handout or online at <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/doverbeach.html>); Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"(online at <http://eserver.org/books/intentions/the-decay-of-lying.html>).

T 8/31 - Order continued. Readings: Arnold and Wilde continued; Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar" (246), "The Snow Man" (247), "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" (247)..
Th 9/2 - Stevens continued. Readings: "Sunday Morning" (237-240), "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (243), "The Idea of Order at Key West" (249-250), excerpts from "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (251), "Of Modern Poetry" (255-256), excerpts from "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (256-257).

T 9/7 - Order continued (in a somewhat different register). Readings: Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (source TBA), Mrs. Dalloway.
Th 9/9 - Mrs. Dalloway continued. Reading journal due (this installment cannot be skipped).

T 9/14 - Mrs. Dalloway continued.
Th 9/16 - Mrs. Dalloway continued. Short paper due.

T 9/21 - Depths and revelations. Readings: Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself": in NAMCP, section 11 (10-11); also section 24 (online at <http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html>, scroll down to section 24); reading more of the poem, e.g. the selections in NAMCP (4-17), is strongly recommended if you've never read the poem before); Sigmund Freud, excerpt from Civilization and Its Discontents (at <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/freud-civ.html>); D. H. Lawrence, "Piano" (329), "Medlars and Sorb-Apples" (329-330), "Snake" (333-335), "The English Are So Nice!" (339), "The Poetry of the Present" (960-963).
Th 9/23 - Depths and revelations continued. Reading: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood. Reading journal due.

T 9/28 - Nightwood continued.
Th 9/30 - Nightwood continued.

T 10/5 - Nightwood continued.
Th 10/7 - Nightwood continued. Reading journal due.

T 10/12 - Significant form. Reading: Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur" (76), "The Windhover" (77) and "Pied Beauty" (78) in NAMCP; also "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection" (online at <http://www.bartleby.com/122/48.html>; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (472-482).
Th 10/14 -Eliot continued.

T 10/19 - Form and the visual arts: cubism. Readings: Paintings and theory TBA: Gertrude Stein, "Susie Asado" (185), excerpts from "Tender Buttons" (180-185), excerpt from "A Transatlantic Interview" (986-993); Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (244-246).
Th 10/21 - Cubism continued. Reading: Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. Reading journal due.

T 10/26 - The Sound and the Fury continued.
Th 10/28 - Library research day; meet in the library.

T 11/2 - The Sound and the Fury continued.
Th 11/4 - The Sound and the Fury continued. Reading journal due.

T 11/9 - The clash of cultures. Reading: Kipling, "Shillin' a Day" (146-147), "We and They" (156); Yeats, "A Coat" (102), "Easter, 1916" (105-106), "The Second Coming" (111), "Leda and the Swan" (118), "Sailing to Byzantium" (123-124), "Among School Children" (124-126). Annotated bibliography due.
Th 11/11 - The clash of cultures continued. Reading: Forster, A Passage to India.

M 11/15 - A Passage to India continued.Long paper due for those who want a chance to revise.
T 11/16 - A Passage to India continued.
Th 11/18 - A Passage to India continued.

T 11/23 - A Passage to India continued. Reading journal due.
Th 11/25 Thanksgiving Recess

T 11/30 - A Passage to India continued. Long paper due.
Th 12/2 - last day of class

Th 12/9, 1:15 - 3:15 - Final Exam.